The freeze a couple weeks ago kept temperatures below freezing most of the week (lows in the teens). There wasn’t much snow, but something whitish that resembled snow that took forever to melt… freezing rain or sleet, I guess. It took out the celery and chard, and the artichoke plants took a beating. Even the kale got “burned,” but most of the leaves were still harvestable. The Chard and artichokes will resume growing with new leaves. The alliums (leeks and garlic) were totally fine. Surprisingly, the lettuce also seems to have survived fine. The ice took down the deer netting fence in spots. I tacked it back up when the freeze was over.
A little January lettuce harvest before the temps go into the teens for the weekend. (It’s been growing since fall… super slow. The lettuce in the cold frame was larger, but just barely.)
It has been a very rainy month, but then yesterday was a high of 88°. The plum tree is done blooming, and now the pear tree is blooming.
The onions are growing really well. Heather planted a few more a couple days ago.
Today Heather transplanted cabbage, and she seeded some bush beans. It might still be too early for beans, but we’ll see.
Three artichoke plants survived last summer and through the winter. I finally mulched them with a thick layer of wood chips. Hopefully that will help them out this year.
Heather started parsley in trays a month ago, and it finally sprouted (parsley takes a while). She also has a bunch of lettuce starts waiting to be transplanted.
Sometime in the fall, Heather obtained a boatload of manure for the garden. Actually, not a boatload; more like a yachtload. Today I used the tractor to scrape off a few cubic yards of it and spread out the remainder across the garden.
Heather is super excited about having seeded her first indoor starts for the season: little gem lettuce, red Russian kale, mizuna, romanesco broccoli, Chinese broccoli, and green cauliflower. She made some garden markers, too.
In the stories of Peter Rabbit, as of today I ally myself with Mr. McGregor.
The bunnies are escaping on a daily basis. They mowed down all of the leeks, tatsoi, peppers, tomatoes, snapdragons, a few garlics, and all of my lettuce. I’m not a happy gardener.
The tatsoi has sprouted nicely, the orach pretty well, and the mizuna, lettuce, and cutting greens sparsely. Keeping the soil surface moist has been a challenge this week due to extremely high winds (strong east winds blew the farm stand over yesterday) and very low humidity.
I finished installing the garden irrigation system today. We can run two soaker hoses on each of the six garden rows.
This evening we planted tatsoi, muzuna, and orach in row 5, and little gem lettuce and cutting mix in row 6 (3×3 patches about 6 feet in from the east end). The seeds are so tiny, they remind me of having “faith as a grain of mustard seed.” It’s hard to believe that these ones will grow into food for the dinner table.
Grant transplanted lettuce, kale, and spinach.
I transplanted some plants that Heather started. From the end in: kale (dwarf blue curled), chard (mixed colors Swiss), spinach (Bloomsdale), lettuce (cutting mix), lettuce (unknown–the label faded), and marigolds (petite orange). Some of the starts were waterlogged and others were dry, so we’ll see how they do.
